PHOTOSHOP - Potential Effects

GENERAL RESEARCH


A list of 50 tutorials by Hongkiat.

A list by Speckboy.

The Photoshop Tutorial YouTube channel.



FOR DYSTOPIAN URBAN SETTING

City Destruction.

Would shoot some low angles of city in order to achieve this.

These aren't really that appropriate.



MORE:
https://blog.photoshopcreative.co.uk/blog/tutorials/qa-tutorials/how-can-i-create-a-dystopian-image/
Google search for album covers specifically.

For the band members:

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INDIE DP #4: Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz

POSSIBLE POINTS OF INFLUENCE:

• ...

ACT: Yeah Yeah Yeahs
FULL TITLE: It's Blitz!
YEAR: 2009
TYPE OF ALBUM: Third studio album
DESIGN: ..
PHOTOGRAPHY: ...

GENRE: Synth punk, alternative pop, indie rock
LABEL: Dress Up

SINGLES:

No results, shows their relatively unknown status still:



FRONT COVER
Artist and album title not on there, goes with the band not going there, they are not as eager as more mainstream bands and the majority of solo artists to have their image all over the branding.
Rule Of Thirds has been observed for the hand.
If this is a woman's hand, then it still enforces the hegemony of gender roles and images, and as this band has a female singer it might be assumed it's supposed to be her. 

BACK COVER
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INSIDE
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PHOTOGRAPHERS #1 - Anton Corbjin

"The Secret Behind" Anton Corbijn's signature look.

Actually only Martin Gore talking about Corbijn

On Dutch TV being interviewed (you need to turn on the subtitles)

Interview when releasing his film debut, Control:

Dave Calhoun is left in no doubt who called the shots on the new film about the life and death of Joy Division‘s Ian Curtis. Just don‘t call director Anton Corbijn a 'rock photographer'.
Anton Corbijn hates being called a rock photographer. True, he’s best known for photographing U2 in bare, black-and-white landscapes (check out the cover of ‘The Joshua Tree’, that’s one of his) and he first came to the UK from Holland 28 years ago as a 24-year-old photographer with the sole intention of putting Joy Division in front of his lens, but the 52-year-old still grumbles about how the British have pigeon-holed him as a snapper of musicians when, goddamn it, he’s an artiste. If in doubt, suggests Corbijn, take a glance at the covers of his books... You can safely assume that this topic has been bothering him for a while. 
‘I have four main books,’ explains Corbijn over breakfast in a café in Belsize Park, where he has lived for nearly a decade. ‘And if you look at the covers of those four books, the first is grey, the second is of Clint Eastwood, the third is of Danny DeVito and the fourth is black. That is not typical for a rock photographer. I like to take a slightly intellectual approach to things, and rock photography is very different to that. I’m very defensive about it. In England, I get labelled, and I’ve never had a museum exhibition here, nothing. It’s unbelievable. In Europe, there have been major exhibitions of my work with incredible attendance. Without sounding pompous, I don’t think the English have realised the value of what I’ve done. There’s nobody like me. Anyway, that’s my little rant.’
True to the great tradition of portrait photographers, Corbijn is no shrinking violet. He’s an affable interviewee, polite and interesting, but you suspect that you wouldn’t want to cross him. At one point, I mention NME and a recent cover that it ran following the death of Tony Wilson. 
‘I don’t do anything for NME any more,’ Corbijn says quietly. ‘I sued them a few times.’ He tells a story, too, of how Peter Hook, the bass player in Joy Division and New Order, ‘was ranting’ that Corbijn had too much control over his new feature film about Joy Division. Corbijn laughs off that accusation and wonders what else a director should have other than control, but still you wonder from where that particular moan originated.
Considering his gripe about being thought a rock photographer, it may not be the smartest move in the history of personal brand management for Corbijn to have opted for Joy Division’s Ian Curtis as the focus of his first feature. But, in other ways, it makes perfect sense: he photographed the band within two weeks of moving to England in 1980 and in the late 1980s made a video for the re-release of their single ‘Atmosphere’ at the request of Tony Wilson. The aesthetic of ‘Control’ is familiar from Corbijn’s photography: black-and-white, intimate, elegiac. 
Whether or not the film does service to Corbijn’s perception in this country – and frankly that’s unimportant – it’s a good stab at filmmaking for someone who’s only previously made videos and shorts. 
‘Control’ has already picked up awards and rave reviews at Cannes, Edinburgh and Toronto, and is certainly one of the more interesting British films to emerge this year. Twenty seven-year-old Sam Riley (you may have seen him play Mark E Smith in ‘24 Hour Party People’) plays Curtis in a film that’s respectful, sober and devoid of hysteria as it relates the push and pull between the life of a touring musician and that of a young husband and father. Curtis was suffering from epilepsy and struggling with his marriage when he hanged himself in his Macclesfield home in 1980. 
The film begins with Curtis, still at school, meeting Deborah, his future wife, and ends with a beautiful shot of smoke rising out of a crematorium. It’s not a film of wild theories. Neither is it a series of highs and lows leading to tragedy. Instead it’s a considered portrait of what it means to be young, depressed, ill and a musician about to tour America. It stands as a tribute to the band’s music, too, with the actors playing Curtis, Hook, Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris doing a decent job of playing Joy Division’s songs. 
Corbijn admits that he knew little about cinema or filmmaking when he agreed to make the film. ‘I never have the time to go to the cinema.’ Rather it was his personal and professional connection to Curtis that gave him the confidence to agree to the project when offered Matt Greenhalgh’s script by producers. 
‘For many years I wanted to do a film but I never had the courage to clear my desk and say, OK I’ll take a year off and do a film. I’m not educated as a filmmaker, so it’s quite a jump for me.’ He knew enough about his subject to be sure that he didn’t want ‘Control’ to be mythical, ‘just very human, a bit like my photography’.
At one point, the film became more personal than Corbijn may have wished. Funding fell through and he had to make up the shortfall with his own cash to avoid delaying the project. How much did he put in? ‘I put in half the budget.’ Which, by a rough calculation, amounts to £1 million. ‘If you’re an artist, it’s OK to put your money into your art. The advantage, in hindsight, is that you become the film, and the film becomes you, you breathe it. There’s nothing else in your world, and maybe that was very good for the film.’ 
‘Control’ opens on Oct 5.

DIGIPAK #2: Björk - Bastards

POSSIBLE POINTS OF INFLUENCE:

• The landscape shots, can't achieve it with the current, however with the Year 8 student who has a drone there might be potential to do it, however shooting in Trier might be an issue

ACT: Björk
TITLE: Bastards
TYPE: Third remix album
YEAR: 2012
NO. of TRACKS: 13
GENRES: Electronica, Experimental, IDM, Art Pop
LABEL: One Little Indian (UK independent)

Björk is re-releasing remixes.

Landscape shots 

DIGIPAK RESEARCH - Ideas for Deluxe Edition

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• Bigger, portrait-like photographs (Lana Del Rey's Ultraviolence Super Deluxe Edition)
• Postcards of the Album Artwork (Depeche Mode's Sounds Of The Universe), or maybe just poststamps instead 
• Pictures of the band eating out, in normal clothes (break the illusion), maybe do that when we're actually going for a drink (DM's Sounds Of The Universe)

PHOTOGRAPHY THEORY #10 - Grant Scott: Do we need it?

Article by Grant Scott, founder/curator of United Nations Photography writing for Medium.

Let me put my cards on the table. I came to photography as a fan. A fan of the images I saw in magazines and on record covers in the Seventies and early Eighties before starting to work as an art director on magazines in the United Kingdom. Magazines that exist to be aspirational, entertaining, informative and most importantly profitable. My view of photography was formed within that commercial context, I never studied photography (I studied graphics at art school) so I was never introduced to the sacred tomes of Sontag or Barthes. I had seen John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Robert Hughes’s Shock of the New on television but this was as intellectual entertainment not as academic doctrine to support dissection, deconstruction and debate.Despite this ‘commercial background’ whilst art directing magazines I commissioned photographers such as Abbas, Leonard Freed, Don McCullin, Jane Bown, William Klein, Steve Pyke, Sylvia Plachy, Chris Steele Perkins, Corrine Day, The Douglas Brothers and Kurt Markus amongst many others. Photographers whose work could sit as easily within areas of traditional photo-journalism or contemporary art as it did within the pages of a glossy magazine, but most importantly the photographers that I commissioned were those whom I admired, respected and enjoyed purely from a photographic perspective.
Fast forward to today and I find myself within an academic, a commercial, a photographic and perhaps most importantly an online environment. Photography is intrinsic to all of these environments but it is the way in which it is viewed and interpreted in each that I believe creates a series of unnecessary barriers for many to engage with photography and navigate its highways and byways.
In a recent interview the photographer and Magnum member Martin Parr declared “Photography is the most democratic art form we have in the world.” I agree with Martin, a photographer whose exhibitions and books are much reviewed, dissected, revered and as often dismissed and vilified but whose work helping to sell frozen food products, luxury clothing brands and streetwear is largely ignored by the theoretic photographic cognoscenti. Which makes me wonder if the writing about photography is as democratic and open as the art itself?Let’s start with the word ‘commercial’. Despite the influence that this work has on our daily lives, it’s creative impact on our visual awareness and its positive impact in supporting a photographic economy ‘commercial photography’ is too often and quickly dismissed by the critics, commentators and academics who deem it to not be ‘serious’ photography. It is this compartmentation of photography based upon critical, academic and theoretical premise that I take issue with.
I can enjoy all forms of photography from the brash image created to sell me a hamburger to a body of work created over decades shedding light upon a narrative of global importance. I do not feel the need to place either in a position of photographic importance both have their place in our cultural awareness. So why do so many ‘cultural elite’ commentators feel the need to do so? Well, let’s think about that.My personal experience of conversations with those who adopt and propagate these views, listening to talks and reading too many linguistically verbose articles illustrates one common factor. That is that few of those speakers and writers have any real knowledge of ‘commercial photography’ and even fewer have worked within it in any capacity.
This may take us some way to understanding the dismissive attitude many have towards it but it also I believe explains why other areas of work are so often exalted beyond their actual importance.To theorize about a subject with any level of authority requires understanding, without that understanding theory is too clearly revealed as ill-informed opinions to those who have the understanding the writer does not have. Many of the critics and theorists I am referring to have never worked as a photographer in any context, they have studied art based theory and continued their studies into a career focusing on themes based on their academic studies and reading. They also continue to use a form of unnecessarily complex academic language (often described as ‘art speak’) in their writing. Within an academic context this is theory as research and when I say research I mean research as is defined by institutions, through papers created to appear within academic journals and at conferences with little if any relevance or impact on or to the wider photographic community.
I have no issue with this. It exists within a niche created for a specific reason. Just as ‘commercial photography’ is created to meet a need and provide an income this academic approach to photography provides a career for those involved with it. In turn reflecting on work created within personal areas of exploration outside of the commissioned market makes sense for those reviewing works that accepted theories and understanding can explain through the academics best friend the attributed reference.
We all benefit from insight into work, to question is vitally important and context helps us with our understanding of all creative endeavour. However, impenetrable academic text, agenda heavy theory and ill-informed criticism does none of these things.The ability for everyone to have an opinion and the easy availability of online publishing (I know just as I am doing here, the irony is not lost on me at this point) has resulted in a tsunami of theory based journals and articles. But how much of it is of any real importance or relevance to us as photographers? We are constantly being told that the proliferation of images online is devaluing photography and in turn the role of the professional photographer. Surely, the same could be said of photography based writing.
I love photography but despite my passion for and knowledge of the subject I find myself, regularly confused, frustrated and quite frankly bored by so much of the criticism and theory I am presented with.I want to understand more about photography, I want to read informed criticism and I’m happy to have these insights come from an academic perspective. But I want that writing to be based upon informed personal knowledge, not just referenced texts. I want it to be open to all areas of practice and I want it to be written in a language which is accessible to all. Great writing is not based on linguistic gymnastics but clearly communicated thoughts, ideas and beliefs delivered with panache and imagination.
Just as my tastes in photography are varied I’d like the writing on the subject to demonstrate a similar level of variety. I believe that we need critics, theorists and rigorous academic reflection on photography but we do not need it to be narrow focused, ill-informed, unreadable and elitist. Critics, theorists and academics are all writing for a reason, to be paid by a publication, to raise profile, to develop a book concept and to fulfil academic research commitments. Just as a commercial photographer shoots to a brief to please a client so the critic, theorist and academic fulfils their brief.
I am not a philistine when it comes to my understanding of photography but I do find myself agreeing with Albert Einstein who said that “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”.My call to all critics, theorists and academics is for them to think about why they are writing what they are writing and for them to be honest about that intention with the reader. If you don’t want anyone to understand what you are writing, then at least be honest about it. But if you want to communicate with me, inform and maybe even entertain me. Then bring it on. I want to read it!

Similar point to Carol Vernallis (click here to read my post on her) who says that music videos can't have a narrative?

PHOTOGRAPHERS #2 - Brian Ziff

Brian Ziff, worked with her on her second album Hopeless Fountain Kingdom.

Website

Instagram

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